Slow Windows Explorer

[glorybound]

You guys are some of the smartest people I know, so I'll ask here.

When I select anything in Windows Explorer, it take 30 seconds for the explorer to respond. Not just network discovery, which is also painfully slow; I am talking local copies of things. I keep my machine pretty clean, and I just did a chkdsk, which came up clean. What else can I look into?

THANKS!

[glorybound]

Oh yah! Windows 7 Pro x64

[jujubee]

1) Could be an issue with wrong registry keys having been deleted. Do you use CCleaner, Auslogics (which is good for some but does serious damage for others), or anything else?
2) If you can remember when it was last fast, I'd recommend a system restore. It should revert back yet retain your most recent work files.
3) Try disabling any sort of AV you might have running to see if that helps. You might want to also run it on low priority if your downloads/surfing is minimal.
4) Remove all hardly used software.
5) Go through your Device Manager and "show hidden." Every time you plug in a device, it keeps a shadow copy running in the BG which has been known to cause issues. I just backup then delete all greyed out hidden entries. You might want a restore point created before doing this.
6) Auslogics Disk Defrag for old drives and a disk trim for SSDs.
7) Super Antispyware and Spybot.
Look at startup entries and disable anything you don't need very often.
9) Run a chkdsk or scn on your mechanical drives with options to repair.

Let me know if this helps.

[glorybound]

I do use CCleaner and I have used Auslogis, but now I also use WinZip's System Protector. I was hoping this was a known issue and an easy fix.

[jujubee]

Without having more detailed information from you, the steps I've outlined will probably help.

Just recently I encountered something similar with slow loading screens.
Restoring to a week before solved the problem but I think it mostly had to do with Auslogics Boostspeed deleting some important registry information.
It might even be just a recent Windows service pack that has caused some of these freezes (another option is to revert Windows updates a couple of weeks back and see if that helps too.)
My recommendation: if you're using Boostspeed - don't. As great as some of their features are, I find it does more harm than good to higher end systems. It's best off left on your parents/grandparents computers. However their Disk Defrag tool is pretty decent.

The best any of us can do is to try to figure out when certain issues started to happen and mentally going back in time to remember what was installed, changed, etc.
It's funny that you brought this up - although I'm on 8.1, I had something similar happen this past week.

One more thing I should add is to check out the free Slimdrivers which does a good job of keeping hardware drivers up to date.